Walter Lippmann Quotes

172 Sourced Quotes

The great social adventure of America is no longer the conquest of the wilderness but the absorption of fifty different peoples.

Walter Lippmann
The best servants of the people, like the best valets, must whisper unpleasant truths in the master's ear. It is the court fool, not the foolish courtier, whom the king can least afford to lose.

Walter Lippmann
The final test of a leader is that he leaves behind him in other men the conviction and the will to carry on.

Walter Lippmann
Ages when custom is unsettled are necessarily ages of prophecy. The moralist cannot teach what is revealed; he must reveal what can be taught. He has to seek insight rather than to preach.

Walter Lippmann
Private property was the original source of freedom. It still is its main bulwark.

Walter Lippmann
Many a time I have wanted to stop talking and find out what I really believed.

Walter Lippmann
It requires wisdom to understand wisdom: the music is nothing if the audience is deaf.

Walter Lippmann
The whole speculation about morality is an effort to find a way of living which men who live it will instinctively feel is good.

Walter Lippmann
The chief element in the art of statesmanship under modern conditions is the ability to elucidate the confused and clamorous interests which converge upon the seat of government. It is an ability to penetrate from the na?ve self-interest of each group to its permanent and real interest. Statesmanship consists in giving the people not what they want but what they will learn to want.

Walter Lippmann
Statistics then is no automatic device for measuring facts.

Walter Lippmann
The people who really matter in social affairs are neither those who wish to stop short like a mule, or leap from crag to crag like a mountain goat.

Walter Lippmann
A democracy which fails to concentrate authority in an emergency inevitably falls into such confusion that the ground is prepared for the rise of a dictator.

Walter Lippmann
When men are brought face to face with their opponents, forced to listen and learn and mend their ideas, they cease to be children and savages and begin to live like civilized men. Then only is freedom a reality, when men may voice their opinions because they must examine their opinions.

Walter Lippmann
The life of a savage is beset by glowering terrors: from birth to death he lives in an animated world; where the sun and the stars, sticks, stones, and rivers are obsessed with his fate. He is busy all the time in a ritual designed to propitiate the abounding jealousies of nature. For his world is magical and capricious, the simplest thing is occult.

Walter Lippmann
Even the most refined statistics are nothing but abstractions.

Walter Lippmann
The host of men who stand between a great thinker and the average man are not automatic transmitters. They work on the ideas; perhaps that is why a genius usually hates his disciples.

Walter Lippmann
A better distribution of incomes would increase that efficiency by diverting a great fund of wealth from the useless to the useful members of society. To cut off the income of the useless will not impair their efficiency. They have none to impair. It will, in fact, compel them to acquire a useful function.

Walter Lippmann
We are quite rich enough to defend ourselves, whatever the cost. We must now learn that we are quite rich enough to educate ourselves as we need to be educated.

Walter Lippmann
It is better to catch the idol-maker than to smash each idol.

Walter Lippmann
Inevitably our opinions cover a bigger space, a longer reach of time, a greater number of things, than we can directly observe. They have, therefore, to be pieced together out of what others have reported and what we can imagine.

Walter Lippmann
The true speech of man is idiomatic, if not of the earth and sky, then at least of the saloon and the bleachers.

Walter Lippmann
Usually it is the stereotyped shape assumed by an event at an obvious place that uncovers the run of the news.

Walter Lippmann
Where love exists with self-respect and joy, where a fine environment is provided for the child, where the parents live under conditions that neither stunt the imagination nor let it run to uncontrolled fantasy, there you have the family that modern men are seeking to create.

Walter Lippmann
The emancipated woman has to fight something worse than the crusted prejudices of her uncles; she has to fight the bewilderment in her own soul.

Walter Lippmann
Men command fewer words than they have ideas to express, and language, as Jean Paul said, is a dictionary of faded metaphors.

Walter Lippmann